Tästä maasta tulee maailman onnellisin kanssa. Sekä kotimaista ohukaisjauhe. Suunnittelettelä pasittelen lettukestejä tai vohvelia amiaista, niin kotimaista tuoteperheistä löydot maistuvaa jokaisen ruokahetkeen. Kotimaista, tästä maasta ja S-ryhmän ruokakaupoista. -Tilli maisterin kuumalinja, henrialleen. -Nu tervei. Olen täs haatelun rillata, mutta sillä on kakuttein marinautia, niin minun rillinin on hävin. -Teet marinautia? -Ei, aite, tän aina. -Oke, nooni. Se grilliä nyt tanut tykkäsun marinaarista. Sunkannattas hakea liitlistä grilllimasterin marinaa, me ja possun kasler pihevejä. -He tuo grilljen kylä pois piilosta. -Ja, grilllimasteri on vai? -Kirillimasteria. -Kirillattavat liitlistä. Sekannattaa. -Gad evening, ladies and gentlemen. -Ain eikä, valmiin jälkeen 20. ja kylä. -Ei, kylä, kylä, kylä, kylä, jälkeen. Kylä, jälkeen, kylä, jälkeen, jälkeen. Se on kylä, jälkeen, jälkeen, jälkeen, jälkeen. -Mattisikas, pakas, warhol ja alastin. -Loksi, alastin. Joda Fenn pienet ainu Videos, jota Assistant Al Junerikki. päivöhän originallyan têtepääkin niin ovat pu багallahyun, mutta mitään näistä hetkellä k reb тур 듣tiau hennyt Steven Pailittely choosesa al aiemmasta sitäiin nuotoin 10850 000 suensiteärin neljä maaperoccupissa
เirö Intojien hausin videomassa desenvolvimmassa etukaisil Cette feu freestyle haluaa
mentsiä silloin Mister Tedrada Rin ja h出來 maistamista hyvin, joi tämä halve 2022, mitä cennetlaudioht bingeittaa. PatotaIRE30, onklight? Lo sacrifices T hypothesis evaluations 30- 36-oil on canvas 2016, ja onko se on tullut hienoa tullut kertaa? Tämä on tullut kertaa, että ne olivat tullut kertaa, ja se on tullut kertaa. Tämä on tullut kertaa, että ne olivat tullut kertaa, että ne olivat tullut kertaa. Tämä on tullut kertaa, mutta nyt onko se, että se on tullut kertaa. Tämä on koko koko. Myös on, että se on jatka, että tekee jatka. Tämä on jatka. Tämä on jatka, että minulla on jatka, että minulla on jatka. Koko jatka, että minulla on jatka, että minulla on jatka, tiedä. Tämä on jatka, että minulla on jatka, että minulla on jatka, että minulla on jatka. Jatka, että minulla on jatka. Jatka, että minulla on jatka, että minulla on jatka. As the auction you're noted at the opening of the bid, Alex Neil is having a moment. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had recently opened a full-blown retrospective of her work. "Gyminyt 200,000?" "Gyminyt 300,000." By the time the gavel went down at Christie's, Dr. Fingers' waiting room had easily set a new sales record for an Alex Neil painting. "Two million five, two million five hundred thousand." The buyer was anonymous, bidding by telephone. Alex was calling for two million five, so two five, to call eighteen eighty six. How did this happen? How did a painting by an artist who struggled most of her life sell for two and a half million dollars nearly four decades after her death? That is a complicated question. For most of her life she painted in complete obscurity. That's Phoebe Holban, who wrote a biography of Alex Neil. It's called "The Art of Not Sitting Pretty." She was devoted to portraiture. She was a humanist. She coined a term for herself that she was an anarchic humanist. Neil was born in 1900 just outside of Philadelphia and attended art school at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. During a summer program she met a man she would marry. His name was Carlos Enriquez de Gomez and he was from one of the richest families in Cuba. They briefly lived in Havana and actually her first solo and group exhibitions occurred in Cuba. And that's Kelly Baum, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum. She's one of the curators who recently mounted the Alice Neil retrospective. That moment was formative for the artist. She and Carlos would leave the compound in which they lived with his family to paint ordinary folks, people of color on the streets of Havana. She was also introduced to left-wing politics and philosophy. Alice and Carlos had a baby daughter and moved back to the U.S. settling in New York, but their daughter died from diphtheria. They had another daughter. Carlos took her to Cuba with vague plans to meet up with Alice later in Paris. That never happened. Alice had a nervous breakdown and twice attempted suicide. She spent some time hospitalized back in Pennsylvania. Eventually she returned to New York, Phoebe Hobern again. In the early 30s, she participated in the first outdoor Washington Square fair. And she already was causing scandals. She did this painting called "Degenerate Madonna" and the Catholic Church made her remove it from her little stand outside the park. So she did have some notoriety in the 30s and even in the 40s. Neil was a devout practitioner of a style of painting called "Social Realism." She was adept at capturing everyday people caught up in everyday struggles. But social realism was being sidelined by a new movement. Abstract expressionism, painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko, whose work was considered more cerebral. And that's what pushed Alice Neil into obscurity. I would say the 40s and 50s, those were the decades when Neil was ignored perhaps the most. When she really suffered some neglect. Kelly Baum again from the Metropolitan Museum. It was also the Cold War and abstraction was being instrumentalized by curators' museums and even the United States government. Instrumentalized meaning weaponized, really. Abstract paintings were being exported to Europe and displayed as symbols of democracy and capitalism. The US State Department and the CIA promoted the exhibition of abstract expressionist paintings around the world. The idea was to show that American artists, even the most avant-garde ones, enjoyed a freedom that you couldn't even dream about in a communist regime. And Neil was a communist and had been a communist since 1935. How much did the political environment and the rise of abstract expressionism contribute to the stall of Alice Neil's career? It's hard to say. Whatever the case, she stuck with her style of anarchic humanism, figurative painting, not abstract, even as her style grew increasingly outdated. Ultimately, there's not any artist who doesn't want to be part of history and to be part of what is called the canon. That had always eluded Alice Neil. Neil did get some recognition in the last 20 years of her life, but her work still didn't sell for much. It wasn't until 1989, five years after she died, that one of her paintings even went up for auction. It featured a man of no known consequence named Robert Gilbert. It was made just a couple years after Dr. Fingers' waiting room. Christie's auction house estimated the Gilbert painting to sell for $7,000 to $10,000, but it didn't sell even for that. It was what auction houses called "Baudin", which is art speak for saying that no one wanted it. But now, here we are in 2021, the estimated price that Christie's put on Dr. Fingers' waiting room was $600,000 to $800,000. You remember what happened? I'm selling to Alex's telephone for $2,000,000,000, sold to $5,000 to Pell 1886. It would be almost impossible for her to imagine, even in 1982 or '83, that paintings of hers would sell for those kinds of prices. So we've been working with Alice Neillis Estate for more than 10 years. It's been almost a textbook journey in a way at way. How these things can play out. And that is David's Werner. He is one of the most successful art dealers in the world. You can't argue that a show at the Met does not impact the standing of Alice Neill. Now this show is a triumph, right? quedabui. Ripeväga.
that will move prices. The Alice Neal story may be extraordinary, but it's also what can happen in the art market. It's one of the strangest markets that I have ever seen. That's Cannes Prendergast, an economist who studies the art market. There's very few people that can index the market top to bottom. And that's Amy Capelazzo, who used to run contemporary art departments at both Christie's and Sotheby's. So that's why I'm on the show. Is it because I'm one of the people that can index the market? Can you define index the market in this case? Sure. This Picasso is 100 million. This one is 60 to 65 million. This one is 50. This one's 22 on a good day. Capelazzo, Prendergast, and Zwirner are just a few of the smart people who will be our tour guides as we embark today on a three-part series, the hidden side of the art market. Now, why do we need three episodes? Because, as you'll hear, nearly everything in the art market is hidden. There's this phrase that was coined by a friend of mine called LPM Lies per Minute. We'll hear from the ultimate taste makers in the art world. I'm Glenn Lowry, and I'm the director of the Museum of Modern Art. We'll ask artists how they feel about the art market. How does it make me feel? It feels a little bit like a grift. I think the whole thing is vulgar. And, of course, the economists. Odd is a bad investment. We'll also try to see where things are heading next. I made a comment that everyone in the Grandmother is going to be selling NFTs now, and that I ended up making an NFT of my Grandmother in Solter. In this first episode, we will look at what the art market is and isn't, who the players are, and where, in this market, unlike any other, the elbows are sharpest. It's hard to offend me, but I'm just pointing out obvious bias you have. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner. It seems like every few months there is a new record set for a sale of contemporary art. Auction Records shattered at Sotheby's Thursday with the $110.5 million sale of this painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat. And not just paintings, digital works, too, including NFTs or non-fundable tokens. The Christie's Auction for Digital Artist People, the final bid, $69 million. Oh my gosh. So is that what we're talking about when we talk about the art market? Not really. Here again is Candace Prendergast. He's an economist at the University of Chicago. It's the Tippity Tippity Tip in a globalized world where very, very wealthy people like to collect contemporary art. Many people think the entire market is the Tippity Tippity, but they're the point 1% people that we're talking about. Okay, that's good to know. Still, if the Tippity Tippity Top of the market gets into 8 and 9 figure prices, the overall art market must be massive, right? The short answer is the art market is incredibly small. That's Magnus Ress, another economist who studies the art market. All the players combined, all the galleries around the world, then all the auction houses, their revenue combined is around $60 billion US dollars. Let's put this into perspective. FedEx makes more than $60 billion. And there is FedEx, UPS and so many other companies. So we are really talking about an industry where a lot of people are involved. Nobody's really making money. I've read there are 100,000 art advisors in the world. What's an art advisor and what value do they add? So, art advisor is almost everyone who studied art history and doesn't know what to do. The role of an art advisor is to have a client and navigate the client through the jungle of galleries and artists and point at artists that the client should buy. There are probably even more than 100,000 art advisors because everyone can call themselves an advisor. I probably know 2,000 art advisors and of those maybe three are actually selling works. Ress has been studying and writing about the art market for years. His latest book is called How to Become a Successful Artist. He has also taught art entrepreneurship at universities including Yale. My students are mostly business students. I always ask him what he want to learn. They say, "How can I make money in the market?" Okay, what's the short answer to that? You can't. Because why? Art is a bad investment. There are only a few artists that are really worth investing in. 99.9% of the artists that you see at galleries and exhibitions, their value will never increase. The art market has too much supply, meaning there are way too many artists meeting very little demand. And yeah, if all one does is read the headlines, one would think the art market is the best it's ever been. Because we hear about record sales at the auction houses. Christie's Sotheby's even Phillips just had a massive record. What we're seeing are two art worlds. One is at the very top. 20 artists are making 40% of the value of the auction art world. While everyone else is struggling, same on the gallery side. You have a few galleries that are dominating the art market. While all the other galleries are failing. So Magnus, what is your mission? I like to make the art market more transparent, so more people buy art. The biggest problem in the art world today is that not enough people are buying art. 200 years ago, it was very common to have 20 to 30 artworks per household. Now, look around you. How many artworks do you have at home? We somehow lost our love for art. We enjoy viewing it in museums, but we don't enjoy buying it. And your argument is that we've lost our love in part because most of us have been priced out. We lost it because galleries made it incredibly difficult to buy art. They established this aura of exclusivity. They established the story that art will go up in value quite dramatically. So everyone is on the hunt for the next bus, Kya and Picasso. But they can't find it, so they get lost. Why do we buy art because we love it and we are supporting a community? We need to change that, and I think we can bring that change by making the art market more transparent. The primary market where most of the artworks are sold is a complete black box. When Rech says the primary market, he means galleries and dealers who tend to project not just exclusivity but secrecy. So in a perfect scenario, I not only see past prices of an art work, but I also see past ownership and so on. Similar to when I go and look at an apartment in New York, I see past rental prices, I see comparable prices and so on. This is what I want to create for the art world. So Magnus Rech created an app, which he named Magnus. It's meant to be a shazam for contemporary art. You point your phone's camera at a work of art in a gallery and the app gives you information on price, ownership, etc. We gathered over 1.5 million price points from galleries through crowdsourcing. It worked perfectly well, but then Apple shut us down because all the galleries complained. Galleries weren't happy because suddenly a buyer knew not only what the current price is, but he also could see previous prices and see that that particular artwork that the galleries is now asking 15K for didn't sell last year at an art market. So on a scale of 0 to 10 with 0 being inscrutable and 10 being totally transparent, how would you rate the art market now? 3. I hope by the end of my lifetime we'll be at a 7. One of the lopsided figures that Rech cited has become even more lopsided lately. The top 20 artists now make up nearly 50% of the auction market for post-war and contemporary art. If you look at galleries and dealers, fewer than 5% of them are responsible for more than 50% of the sales value. To be fair, a lot of industries have this sort of top-heavy imbalance. But as we were told by just about everyone we spoke with for this series, the art market isn't like any other market. Why? There are a lot of reasons. Let's start with the question of whether it's actually a market at all. The economist can't print a gas again. It is a market in the sense that there is a mechanism to allocate goods that depend upon willingness to pay, but it's a very different market to most in the following sense. Most markets are anonymous. If I have the money to buy MRCDs, I get the MRCDs, but that is not true for many, many artists. It's a good that gets assigned to those in the know. Much of the information is held in very narrow social networks. Work is priced in ways that just feel so strange relative to any other market. It's also not like a regular market in that for most of us, if we buy something and we decide we don't like it, Like it? That's right.
course for this. If I buy a car and I don't like it, I can sell it. If I buy a house and I don't like it, I can sell it. Unfortunately, that's very much not true for most art. It's the most illiquid market that I've ever seen. And I think it has a very unfortunate side effect that only those people who can, you know, spend $25,000 and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. I think the market structure itself helps to lead to what's a very elitious to good. The art market is a fascinating, sexy, intellectually compelling, unindexable, unregulated global market. And that, again, is Amy Capilato, formerly of Sotheby's and Christie's Auction Houses. She recently co-founded a new firm called Art Intelligence Global, focusing on Asian markets. It's interesting to hear Capilato call the market "unindexable" because she, you'll remember, told us she is one of the few people who can index it. This Picasso is a hundred million. So what determines the value of a given work of art? The work of art is worth whatever someone will pay for it until it resells. And then you know what it's really worth. If you go to Santa Fe and you're shopping in some gallery and they say, "This wonderful artist from Santa Fe, this work is $50,000." And you're like, "Well, gee, that's a lot." It's okay. I was told to you for $45. Great. You buy it for $45,000. Then you go to an auction house and you say, "Hey, I need to ensure this object. What do you think the value is?" And we say, "Well, it's worth $8,000. It really just has decorative value and it's kind of big in color, so we'll give you eight." It's like, "Whoa, what happened?" There's a pricing model that seems to be used by galleries where, unless you price high, collectors will think this is not a great artist. And what happens is you walk into a gallery, a painting is $100,000. It's somebody you've never heard of before. It'll probably not sell, but in the view of the art world, this is the only thing that I can do or else the collector won't take it credibly. And this is the reason why the secondary market essentially discounts a lot of work so much. When Candice Prendergrass talks about the secondary art market, he means auction houses versus the primary market of galleries and dealers. The secondary market to a first approximation doesn't function, even though it's a durable good in the way that cars are durable, houses are durable, even sneakers these days are durable. So there are all sorts of components of the market that stop it from working. And at the end of the day, mean that maybe 90% of the art that sold sits in a warehouse rather than actually being seen by somebody. The art market is in massive disruption. When you say disruption, you mean an inflow of money? Massive amount, well, can be outflow also, but a huge influx of capital is coming to the art market. A massive amount of private wealth accumulated over the last 15 years because after your fourth house and third boats, this is where you can turn to. So the story that Capilazzo and Prendergrass tell is again a story of two markets. A handful of contemporary artists like Gerhard Richter and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Yoyou Kussama, and Jeff Coons, they sell for tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to wealthy collectors who will put the work in one of their many homes, or maybe in a warehouse, other buyers and would-be buyers, along with most artists, constitute the lesser art market whose prices are distorted by the massive dollars flowing toward the upper market. And where does that leave museums? In the old days, wealthy benefactors loved to build museums to give the public a look at their art collections. A modern billionaire is much more likely to keep their collection private. Here is Met Curator Kelly-Bomb. Well, even the Met has been priced out of the market when it comes to certain artists. Could you name a few? I'd rather not. We could probably guess them if we had to. Sure. There's one more thing that makes the art market so unusual. This has to do with the nature of the objects being bought and sold. Amy Capilazzo again. They're not really a pure commodity market, like they're rare, especially unique things. But can you talk about the value of, I guess you'd call it desire? I mean, it is literally some paint on a canvas. If you came down from Mars, you'd say, wait a minute, that cannot be worth $85 million. There's just no way. Well, first I'd pull back and just say modern capitalism is predicated in the idea that you would take one raw material and transform it into another more valuable material and commodify and sell it. So we'll take some timber and turn it into furniture and sell it for many multiples of the price. Similarly, you would take paint, canvas, graphite paper, whatever it is, make something and turn it into something more valuable. So we're kind of well past the stage of analyzing why that hunk of cloth with paint on it is worth so much. Right. But the multiple of a Picasso versus the multiple of most furniture at least is pretty apples to oranges, yes. Well, but works are already unique. Largely, furniture is something usually made in addition or put in production. So while it can be verified and special and even customized in a certain way, it's not quite the same thing. And it arguably doesn't have the same specific cultural resonance that a certain kind of $85 million painting could have. It is primarily a one-off object that we're trading. That again is the Galarist David's Werner. High-end artworks are ultimately very limited. So you're really dealing with very, very specific objects that have particular histories. We have to have been shown who owned them. What's the development of this artist career? It's really a unique set of circumstances that drives what we do. Coming up after the break, what were the circumstances that brought the late Alice Neal out of obscurity and into the Metropolitan Museum of Art? What's the financial relationship between a museum, a gallery, and an artist? And what tricks do dealers use to get their artists' work into museums? It's understandable why Galarist want to do that, but it's not, in my opinion, the best way to bring an artist into a collection. The hidden side of the art market, part one, continues right after this. Earlier, we met the University of Chicago economist, Candace Prendergast. Candace, yeah, weird Irish name. He mostly studies labor markets, but he's also written quite a bit on the art market. I come from a family where I grew up with art and got interested at the young age. Because of this interest, Prendergast has a secondary duty on campus. He is essentially the chief curator of the contemporary art collection at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Now you might wonder why does a business school have its own art collection? The central feature of higher education is the use of different types of languages to transmit information. What we do in the classroom uses statistics, it uses graphs, it uses mathematics, and I see these as nothing more than languages that sometimes are better than the written word to get an idea across. I think what we're trying to do with the art collection is think of art as simply a language that tells us something about the world. And who are you competing against as a buyer? It's both museums and high level collectors. There's a very notable thing the art world has a very clear hierarchy where it chooses who would like the works to end up with. If you're a gallerist who has an artist who you feel is promising, the way in which you typically will try to cause that artist's career to develop is by placing it in what's seen as the best collections. Give me the hierarchy. Well, MoMA is at the top. The Museum of Modern Art in New York is at the very top of that list. Could you just say your name and what you do please? I'm Glenn Lowry and I'm the director of the Museum of Modern Art. So we are doing these episodes on the art market. What do you think when you hear that phrase? And to what degree is a museum like MoMA a part of the art market? If you're in the museum world, the art market runs parallel and sometimes intersects with what we do. But we're not as focused on the art market as many might think. We're aware of it. Of course, we participate in it because we often acquire works of art or people close to our institutions acquire works of art that ultimately come to us as gifts. But the way in which the art market operates and the way in which we operate are different. What is the relationship between you a museum director at MoMA and big gallerists like a David's Werner, let's say? I try to go around to the galleries on a very regular basis generally once a week. I like to know who's selling art. I like to hear from galleries why they've brought on an artist or what it is about an exhibition that they think is particularly important. So they are colleagues in the larger enterprise if you want to look at it that way of the art world. In what ways are your incentives aligned with theirs and in what ways are they perhaps at cross purposes? They become aligned for instance when we want to do an exhibition of an artist.
that they represent, they can become tangled when we're after a work of art and another entity is equally after that work of art. The responsibility of the Gowerist is clearly to do the best he or she can for the artist he or she represents first, financially, but also in terms of reputation. And we become perhaps important in that equation when it comes to reputation. We do not create financial value. We may incidentally create financial value by making a larger public aware of an artist's importance. But the value we create is art historical importance. It's the ability to explain why an artist merits intense interest and why that interest is rewarded over time. Let's pull back here for a moment. Glenn Lowry is so well regarded that the Museum of Modern Art Board rescinded their policy requiring retirement at age 65 in order to keep Lowry in charge through 2025. He is known not just for his leadership and taste and his art scholarship, but also, as you can tell, when he speaks, for his diplomacy. When Lowry says that MoMA is perhaps important when it comes to the reputation of an artist, that's a bit like saying that the Pope is perhaps important when it comes to steering the Catholic Church. When he says that MoMA may incidentally create financial value when it acquires an artist, well, yes, you'd better believe they do. And when Lowry says the art market runs parallel to his museum and sometimes intercepts, let's take a look at that intersection and how it affects not just the reputation of an artist, but their long-term financial value. Here again is the Galarist David Zwerner. We are selling art, of course, in the primary and secondary market, but you also have to think of us as talent agents. Zwerner represents many of the best known contemporary artists in the world, and he has galleries in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong. We are very often the exclusive managers behind Koreas of artists that are maybe very, very shy, really just want to be in the studio and make work. So we have to get that work out into the world. We have to place it in museums, get them shows across the globe, grow their audience, tell their story in many different ways. I've read that last year you brought in around $800 million across the board a few years ago, 2017 above 500 million. And first of all, those numbers in the ballpark are they pretty accurate? They're in the ballpark. For 2017, that works out to an average price of about $350,000 per piece. So I'm guessing that if we were to do an x-ray of the people who buy at galleries like yours, we're talking not just the 1%, but the 1% of the 1%. Is that pretty much the case? That's absolutely correct. So let's say that a random person walks into one of your galleries, David, let's say I'm that rando. And I see a painting on the wall and I say, wow, I love that. I'd like to have that in my house. How much does it cost, sir? And let's pretend it's that average price of $350,000. And then I say, okay, Mr. Dwariner, I have my checkbook. I'd like to buy it. What happens now? That's a good question because that happens so rarely that I have to step back for a second. I would want to know who you are. So the transaction would not be instantaneous. It would be, let's get to know each other and we would find common ground. People that we know are that you collected that I would know and we would become friends and become a client. As Candice Prendergast told us earlier, one thing that sets the art market apart from most other markets is that most markets are essentially anonymous. If I have the money to buy a Mercedes, I get the Mercedes. But if you or I walk into a major art gallery, well, first of all, there are likely no prices to be seen. Galleries are supposed to keep a price list available for anyone to peruse. Amy Keplazzo again. I suppose in some drawer to avoid being snaked out, someone keeps a price list in a drawer, and that's just really not how art is marketed nor sold. And when David's Werner says that we should get to know each other, to find out the people that we both know and what art I already own, well, let's go back to that Mercedes dealership. Let's say you pick out the model you want. You take a test drive, perhaps you've even settled on the price, and now the dealer says, let's get to know each other a bit. Where do you live? What's your neighborhood like? What sort of cars do your neighbors drive? What other cars do you own or have you owned? What sort of cars do your parents own? What do you plan to do with this car after you're done with it? Do you plan to sell it or perhaps donate it to an institution? And if so, what sort of institution? Do you happen to be friendly with or related to anyone on the board of that institution? That kind of getting to know you doesn't happen for cars. Your contemporary art is sometimes does. It is true that dealers want to fetch an appropriate price for their artists' work, and dealers typically receive a 50% commission, so they've got a strong incentive there, at the same time, they're trying to protect against speculators, people who buy artwork in the hopes of reselling it later for a profit. If I buy a $350,000 painting from David's Werner, there is a chance, if the artist is hot enough, that in short time, this painting will be worth $3.5 million. Someday maybe even $35 million, and if I sell it at auction, that money goes to me, not the Galarist and certainly not the artist. So that's one concern a Galarist has when deciding who to sell to. But as David's Werner told us, there's another concern, the artist's long-term reputation. If Werner sells a coveted piece to some random billionaire, that piece may never be seen by the public. One of the best ways to burnish the reputation of an artist is to get their work shown in museums. When we open a new show, we always give priority to museums. That's just a given. The problem is that museum budgets are often no competition for a billionaire's budget. So what you do then, you talk to the museum and there is the so-called museum discount, so the museum will get special terms. So what kind of discount does a museum get? Let's say it's MoMA. That's a tough question to answer in public because every negotiation is different. Amy Kapilatsu again. Often a living artist will want a preference that their work go to a museum because they're trying to build their legacy and reputation. I really want this to go to Brooklyn Museum and I'll take 50% less just to know that it's there. It usually relieves with artwork to go into a museum collection. And that is Shabbalala Self, a young and successful painter who makes large-scale collages. It's now part of this community of other works that are meant to reflect a certain kind of history. The work goes into a museum. It's there. And it's not an issue of me wondering, will this artwork be resold? Will this artwork be moved to some other part of the world? If one of my sales folks or curator calls me and we have an engagement with the museum, that will be the first thing we try to figure out because that is really what makes the difference for the artist, being in the museum of modern art or not makes a huge difference. So I recently heard of a gallery for an up-and-coming artist in New York who's already changed galleries once in the last few months because she went from warm to very hot, very fast. And the new gallery said they would sell a piece by this artist if the buyer were to first agree to buy another piece by that artist and get it placed in a good museum as a donation. You know, that's done a lot. I personally don't like it and we don't do it. It's our job as galleries to get artworks of our artist into institutions. That's always difficult. Institutions very often don't have the funds. So you need private money to help purchase the work, right? And a quicker way to do it is if you have a long waiting list and you have a high demand artist to say to somebody really one-spon, essentially you have to buy two. One is yours and the other one you gift. I always am a little wary of that because it creates a strange dynamic around the work. You sold free and clear to the collector. It's not something that we like to do. I don't know how widespread it is, but it's certainly out there. Glenn Lowry again from MoMA. And even though we are occasionally, and the "we" here is not just the Museum of Modern Art, museums, are occasionally the beneficiary, I think most of us are not that comfortable with it. It's just a handable, why galleries want to do that? But it's not, in my opinion, the best way to bring an artist into a collection in a way that assures that that artist will live vibrantly within the collection. You could argue that both Glenlowery and David's Werner
Lowry from the museum side, Zwerner from the gallery side, they both have the luxury of staking out the high moral ground. They both enjoy a sterling reputation and have plenty of resources to back it up. Elsewhere in the art world there is much talk of shady behaviors, self-dealing and double-dealing, broken promises and faked invoices, a slippery stream of hype and hyperbole in service of inflating a given artist's valuations. For a gallerist like Zwerner, however, any short-term loss from discounting the sale of artwork to a museum is likely more than recaptured in the long run. Luke Toymans being a great example. Luke Toymans is a Belgian painter in his 60s, his work often explores the human relationship with history. When we started working with him, his prices were $8,000. Now paintings sell in the primary market over $2 million. So this has been a very nice, steady development over many years. And it's been also very logical. He's got a lot of major shows. He has the institutional support that warrants price development. Can you tell me, David, how you first form a relationship with an artist like Toymans and how that relationship evolves over time? So before I opened my gallery, there was a very important exhibition in Europe in 1992, a documentary. A big group show that happens in Castle, Germany every five years. And it used to be an amazing way to serve a talent. So I knew I was going to open a gallery and I was really excited to go to Castle. And I was confronted with a group of small, really, andigmatic paintings. These paintings really struck me. And as I walked a little further, I was in a room, was works by Garrett Richter, the great German master. And I thought, my God, these paintings are great, but the paintings I just saw were really great too. And I'd never heard of Luke Toymans. So I made my way to Antwerp where Luke lives and works then and now. And ultimately had to get down on my knees to beg him to join my gallery because he was already somewhat of an art star at that point. And I didn't have a gallery. So it took three subsequent visits. But what happened is really what should happen. You should see the work first fall in love with the work, then meet the artist and know that there was a chemistry. Now to this day, I understand you don't have a contract with Luke or any artist. Is that true? That is true. All our artists representations are based on handshakes believe it or not. Once you start working with an artist, you really have to look out for what this artist needs and wants at every given time. Not just in the beginning, when it's easy, the first few shows are usually the ones where a larger audience finds an artist. But even more so when you hit the middle of the career, when things maybe are not as exciting and when it takes more hard work to find new audience and tell an artist story. We really are in it for the long haul when we work with an artist on artist estate. Another example of Werner being in it for the long haul, the American painter, Alice Neil. I knew about Alice Neil, of course, but I heard about to increasingly from other artists. Artists are really a point of reference. You really have to listen to what they have to say. Then we searched out the estate and we realized that there's this incredible voice in American painting that's been essentially overlooked. And she's been overlooked because she was a woman in a century where women artists really had a hard time. But more importantly, she was a figurative artist in a century where it was all about American male abstraction ultimately. Alice Neil, as we noted earlier, painted in relative obscurity for most of her life. It wasn't until she was in her early 60s that she finally had formal gallery representation from the well-regarded Graham Gallery. Over the last couple decades of Neil's life, Graham put on eight shows of her work and got it included in several museum shows. She gained some minor celebrity, including a couple appearances on the tonight show with Johnny Carson. But you paint quite a few subjects in the nude. Is that the therapy quest? Oh, I wondered if you wouldn't like to pose. Alice Neil very much enjoyed the attention she got toward the end of her career. But when she died in 1984, her work still wasn't in demand. She'd be thrilled if she got even a few hundred dollars for a painting. So what happened? How did a dead and largely unknown artist turn into such a hot commodity that a painting of her doctor's waiting room sold this year for two and a half million dollars? Here again is the economist Magnus Ress. Estates that have been long forgotten are getting picked up by galleries who have the financial power. And tell the estate owners, hey, are we gonna help and increase the value of the artist and give the artist the final recognition that she really deserves? So they use their contacts to museums, to creators, to writers and to buy us as well and start by giving a solo show to that artist. Often the first solo show in many years, big rediscovery of the works and so on. The gallery in this case was David's Werner by the time he took on Neil's estate in 2009, the value of her paintings had already been rising on the auction market. Now, Werner began to heavily promote Neil's work, a few small exhibitions at first and then a major show in 2017. It all changed when Hilton Alves did this incredible show in our gallery called upto. Hilton Alves is a Pulitzer Prize winning critic and curator with the Alice Neill show he curated at the Werner gallery. He really took her and placed her in Harlem amongst her friends, fellow intellectuals, fellow artists. Hilton Alves is black. His curating a show at the Werner gallery about a white artist who had lived in Harlem began to change the Alice Neill calculus. What nobody realized is that she really painted the world that we live in. She was truly inclusive in her thinking. She would very early on paint a gay couple. She would paint a transgender person. She painted her friends and neighbors, folks of color. Hilton Alves curated a revelatory show, really changed our understanding of that artist. And that's Kelly Baum. Remember her? She is one of the curators at the Metropolitan Museum who would go on to mount the Alice Neill retrospective there. I asked Baum what it was about Neil's work and the moment in history that led the Met to put on this show. There are so many things. First of all, Alice Neill had been on the tips of so many living artist tongues for quite a while. And it was becoming difficult to read or hear an interview and not have the name Alice Neill appear as a source of inspiration or influence. We've been seeing enough Alice Neill to suggest that she was relevant, important, but we hadn't seen too much, which suggested that there was room to curate a really interesting show. Additionally, diversity, equity, accessibility, inclusion, justice writ large were issues that we were all thinking about. And there had been a rising contemporary art of projects that address social justice directly. And that was absolutely true of Alice Neill. She was an advocate for social justice her entire life. And finally, there had not been a large Alice Neill retrospective in the city of New York for almost two decades. And the Alice Neill retrospective at the Met was very large. When a major museum devotes five galleries and primo galleries to a single artist, that's a statement. And that's a statement they made about Alice Neill. That's Phoebe Hobern who wrote the biography of Alice Neill. That book's publisher, by the way, was David's Werner Books? The Met is considered America's Louvre, a world famous iconic museum. The solo show like that stamps an artist as somebody who will go down for the ages. Somebody whose work will never be forgotten. And you know, as we are now handily in the 21st century and looking at each other and trying to understand each other better, there's this artist that's helping us, right? David's Werner again is such a humanist approach to society and to who we are and it's fascinating. And she's now rightfully one of the great, great voices and great portraitist, but also great kind of, you know, historian. So was the Alice Neill show at the Met to some degree as Werner production or creation? Not at all. That's 100% the Met doing that show. I mean, that's a great call you wait for when you do what I do you wait for call from the Met. We are interested in doing an Alice Neill show. So to go back to the money part for a minute went away from the art part, the Met having a huge show of an artist who the state you happened to represent is fantastic news long term for David's Werner. Yes. Of course you look at objective criteria that impact the standing of an artist, right? I think we had her auction record just a couple of weeks ago. So what would you say a median Alice Neill painting would have sold for let's say three years ago and maybe three years from now. I'm going to take a
brain check on that question. That's too speculative for me. You want to give me a rough percentage? I could tell you where we're coming from. I don't want to tell you where we're going. Painting by Neil were sold, you know, between $500,000 and a million dollars a few years ago. And now we're selling pictures between two and three million dollars. So there's been a clear upward trend. But again, a very logical trend, very defendable trend. And yet no matter how logical and defendable it is, there's no guarantee that that trend continues, right? I mean, 10 years from now, Alice Neil could be worth 200,000 or 20 million. There's no way of knowing, is there? I think that's actually where the gallery is important. What can you do, though, as the galleryist to nurture a reputation that's already at that high? Hey, want to now reach out to museums and collectors and other parts of the world. Alice Neil, I would love to present her work in our Hong Kong gallery. She's not really been presented in Asia and there are major shows on the horizon in Europe. And you're really looking at a career globally. And you see what you can do to spread the good word. Think about all the things that had to go right for a relatively obscure, long dead painter named Alice Neil to become one of the biggest rising stars in contemporary art. Now think about all the artists living in dead for whom those things don't happen. Coming up next time on the show, what it's like for a living artist to navigate the strange waters of the art market. The trajectory of an artist is such a bizarre track and it doesn't follow any logic. And how does it feel to see your work sold at auction for a hundred times what you sold it for originally? Artists used to sometimes call me and say, I can't believe you're selling my work. I just sold that for $50,000. I was like, listen, I can put you on the phone with some other artists who sold the work for $50,000. And today it's worth $2,000. That's the second episode in our three part series, the hidden side of the art market. Next week. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. We can be reached at
[email protected]. And our entire archive is available free on any podcast app. This episode was produced by Morgan Levy. We had research help from Lyric Baudich and Alina Kalman, an additional help from Jeremy Johnson. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Ripon, Zach Lepinski, Married Duke, Ryan Kelly, Emma Tarell, Jasmine Klinger, Elinor Osborne and Jacob Clemente. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhiker's. All the other music was composed by Luis Garam. If you like this show or any other show in the Freakonomics Radio network, please recommend it to your friends and family. That is the best way to support your favorite podcasts. As always, thanks for listening. A shark. What does that mean? Well, I mean that in a good way. The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything. Stitcher.
PodcastTranscript AI